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Weather: Patchy fog in the morning. Mostly sunny. Highs in the lower 70s. Northwest winds 5 to 10 mph. Monday Night: Partly cloudy. Lows in the upper 40s. North winds around 5 mph.
Today at the Editor’s Glance:
In court: Felony court takes two pleas in in-high profile cases this morning.
The Flagler County Library Board of Trustees meets at 4:30 p.m. at the Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast. The meeting of the seven-member board is open to the public.
The Bunnell City Commission meets at 7 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The commission is expected to approve Phase 3 of the Grand Reserve development’s preliminary plat, an expansion of 60 single family homes. To access meeting agendas, materials and minutes, go here.
Nar-Anon Family Groups offers hope and help for families and friends of addicts through a 12-step program, 6 p.m. at St. Mark by the Sea Lutheran Church, 303 Palm Coast Pkwy NE, Palm Coast, Fellowship Hall Entrance. See the website, www.nar-anon.org, or call (800) 477-6291. Find virtual meetings here.
In Coming Days:
Evenings at Whitney Lecture Series, Thursday, Jan. 12, hosted by the University of Florida Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience at 7 p.m. This free lecture will be presented in person at the UF Whitney Laboratory Lohman Auditorium, 9505 Ocean Shore Boulevard, in St. Augustine. Those interested also have the option of registering to watch via Zoom live the night of the lecture. Register to watch online here. In this edition: Mandë Holford, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Hunter College, The American Museum of Natural History, CUNY Graduate Center.
Diary: Matlock. On the Hallmark channel, on an overhead TV, in a waiting room at a physical therapy clinic at Shands hospital in Gainesville. There are four people in the waiting room. No one is watching. No one is listening. No one is even glazing over the screen, thinking about bunions or onions or the human condition (hers, thankfully, not Malraux’s). Three people are on their phone. Why are these things on anymore? Why that noise, that intrusive pollution no one cares for, that aggravating television intonation that never ceases, those four-minute commercial breaks every seven minutes, that nasal whine of middle aged women selling housewares to an audience deader than Matlock? And what’s Matlock still doing on TV? What are TVs still doing in public spaces? Why have public spaces become like suburbs–soulless, noisy, so angular, so defeating of anything pleasing to the eye–no one is asking for art, but come on0–that to be in a waiting room feels like consciousness sucked dry of everything but awareness? Can we not spend five minutes alone, in silence, without the paraphernalia of Reagan-era gruel? Aren’t the TVs with a multiverse in every person’s palm enough? Haven’t we caught on that televisions are as antiquated as pay phones, civility and the Hallmark channel? Elvis was onto something when he shot at screens, back when he was in his own waiting room to the inevitable.
Now this: Kids in the Hall: Inexperienced Cannibal
Flagler Beach Webcam:
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
July 2026
Conversations in Democracy
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Palm Coast Beautification and Environmental Advisory Committee
Flagler Beach City Commission Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
It strikes me that at bottom Carver resembles no writer so much as Stephen Crane. Of course, both wrote excellent poetry as well as the fiction for which they are better known, and although both won wide acclaim in their lifetimes, they wrote from outside and deliberately against bourgeois taste and attitude. And both died relatively young. But more to the point, the work of both men is powered by the dramatization of a painful argument with a ferocious, inescapable determinism that, when at last it overpowers their characters, approaches tragedy. Crane’s determinism is more Darwinian, perhaps, and his argument with it more romantically male and adolescent, than Carver’s, in which fate seems locked on to the life-shaping power of the domestic mundane, the mess and grind of ordinary life, and Carver’s argument against it is driven by love.
–From an essay on Raymond Carver by Russell Banks, who died on Jan. 8, in The Atlantic, August 1991.
Laurel says
…and the circus continues. Big Brother, Naked and Afraid, Jersey Shore and now, the Congress’ 20. Now sh0wing on the network of your bias.
James M. Mejuto says
I’m sorry but I do not understand 99% of your political cartoons.
The philosophy goes: If you must go about trying to piece the cartoon together, then it has failed.
Am I the only one who faces this problem?
Pierre Tristam says
This may help.
Laurel says
James: If you were not familiar with the movie “Animal House,” then the cartoon would escape you.
Pierre: If you want a really good laugh, non-politically, try Jerry Van Amerongen. He’s may favorite, and the only person I ever wrote a fan letter to. He wrote back stating “I’ve organized a loose arrangement of dried flowers and a few candles at the foot of your letter (a small shrine, if you will.)” I have several of his books, and his cartoons have made me laugh until tears! His humor is not for everyone: https://www.creators.com/author/jerry-van-amerongen Enjoy!